James Talarico is an articulate thirty-something Texas State Representative, former middle school teacher, and Presbyterian seminarian running for the U.S. Senate as the Democratic nominee. Some have called him a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
His benign, Boy-Scoutish demeanor, his aw-shucks folksiness, his soaring rhetoric, and his passionate advocacy for justice, kindness, and love combine to make him an alluringly attractive public figure. He not only claims the name of Christ, frequently quoting Bible passages to support his policy positions, he bolsters his fiery voice of authority as a Presbyterian seminarian. He encourages voters to embrace “a politics of love.” Sheep’s clothing, indeed.
Nevertheless, he has embraced every fashionably radical Progressive issue with unabashed glee: on abortion, on homosexuality, on transgenderism, on socialism. He has asserted that “God is nonbinary.” He claims that biological sex is on “a spectrum” and that God actually created “six sexes, not two.” He says that the Bible explicitly endorses abortion. He believes “the Scriptures are silent on the issue of gay marriage.” He finds “spiritual truths beyond Christianity,” supporting his vision of “divine universalism.” He has characterized women as “neighbors with uteruses.” He champions an agenda that would insert biological males into girls’ and women’s sports, locker rooms, and private spaces. He has maintained that conservative Christians have embraced beliefs that are “fundamentally un-Christian,” “a perversion of faith,” “unbiblical,” and “heretical.” Ravenous wolf, indeed.
Talarico earned a Master of Arts degree and began a course of study leading to a Master of Divinity, both from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. The institution has long proudly declared its Progressive credentials. The lead banner of its website professes, “Austin Seminary fosters a community of belonging for seekers of all backgrounds and beliefs to explore questions of faith, embrace diverse perspectives, and discover their spiritual path in faith-based vocations.” That is hardly a ringing endorsement of biblical orthodoxy. Quite the contrary, it is an assertion of its determined ambivalence to scriptural truth. In fact, the school’s faculty members are renowned for their renunciation of the virgin birth of Christ, His resurrection, the historical accuracy of scriptural narratives, the exclusivity of the Gospel, and the inerrancy of the Bible. Instead, their courses focus on social justice, liberation theology, cultural diversity, racial inclusion, gender equity, economic leveling, and international decolonization. If anything is “fundamentally un-Christian,” “a perversion of faith,” “unbiblical,” and “heretical,” it would be this.
It is little wonder then that Talarico is so clumsy in handling the Bible passages he is wont to broadcast. His interpretations are frequently out-of-context and wildly misinterpreted. They often do not even remotely address the issues he claims that they do. For instance, he cited the “trial by bitter waters” of Numbers 5 as proof that the Bible is pro-abortion—that it even provides a “recipe” for DIY abortions. But of course, that is not at all what the passage is about. Instead, it is a Levitical test for marital infidelity. He labeled the narrative of the annunciation in Luke 2 a depiction of Mary’s “freedom of choice.” He has described the cleansing of the temple narrative in Mark 11 in terms of economic justice and Marxist activism. He has used the flight of Joseph with his wife and infant into exile in Matthew 2 as an argument for compassionate welcome for illegal immigrants. He relies on the apocryphal “Gospel of Thomas,” a second or third-century Gnostic forgery, as his “scriptural” proof that “Jesus was a feminist” and that “God is pro-trans.”
The trouble with Progressive Christianity, as J. Gresham Machen pointed out a century ago, is that it is simply not Christianity. It is instead a masquerade. In Christianity and Liberalism, he declared,
The truth is that the life-purpose of Jesus discovered by modern liberalism is not the life purpose of the real Jesus but merely represents those elements in the teaching of Jesus—isolated and misinterpreted—which happen to agree with the modern program. It is not Jesus, then, who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.
Machen’s prescience is particularly apt in describing Talarico, whose whole platform has been to use the Bible to convince Christians to ignore what the Bible actually teaches and instead, embrace the very opposite of what it teaches.
While he has drawn praise from such national media figures as Stephen Colbert, Joe Rogan, and David French, as well as every major newspaper in the state of Texas, it would be wise for voters to heed the warning of the prophet Isaiah about men like Talarico: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20).
